. . .
But all at once there comes a noisy chattering in a Teutonic tongue -
and shouts and laughs! . . . How is it possible, so near to the great
dead? . . . And there enters a group of tourists, dressed more or less
in the approved "smart" style. A guide, with a droll countenance,
recites to them the beauties of the place, bellowing at the top of his
voice like a showman at a fair. And one of the travellers, stumbling
in the sandals which are too large for her small feet, laughs a
prolonged, silly little laugh like the clucking of a turkey. . . .
Is there then no keeper, no guardian of this holy mosque? And amongst
the faithful prostrate here in prayer, none who will rise and make
indignant protest? Who after this will speak to us of the fanaticism
of the Egyptians? . . . Too meek, rather, they seem to me everywhere.
Take any church you please in Europe where men go down on their knees
in prayer, and I should like to see what kind of a welcome would be
accorded to a party of Moslem tourists who - to suppose the impossible
- behaved so badly as these savages here.
Behind the mosque is an esplanade, and beyond that the palace. The
palace, as such, can scarcely be said to exist any longer, for it has
been turned into a barrack for the army of occupation. English
soldiers, indeed, meet us at every turn, smoking their pipes in the
idleness of the evening. One of them who does not smoke is trying to
carve his name with a knife on one of the layers of marble at the base
of the sanctuary.
At the end of this esplanade there is a kind of balcony from which one
may see the whole of the town, and an unlimited extent of verdant
plains and yellow desert. It is a favourite view of the tourists of
the agencies, and we meet again our friends of the mosque, who have
preceded us hither - the gentlemen with the loud voices, the bellowing
guide and the cackling lady. Some soldiers are standing there too,
smoking their pipes contemplatively. But spite of all these people, in
spite, too, of the wintry sky, the scene which presents itself on
arrival there is ravishing.
A very fairyland - but a fairyland quite different from that of
Stamboul. For whereas the latter is ranged like a great amphitheatre
above the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora, here the vast town is
spread out simply, in a plain surrounded by the solitude of the desert
and dominated by chaotic rocks. Thousands of minarets rise up on every
side like ears of corn in a field; far away in the distance one can
see their innumerable slender points - but instead of being simply, as
at Stamboul, so many white spires, they are here complicated by
arabesques, by galleries, clock-towers and little columns, and seem to
have borrowed the reddish colour of the desert.
